Notes on the Great Indian Circus

Notes on the Great Indian Circus
Author: Khushwant Singh
Publisher: Penguin Books India
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780141005768

Articles previously published in various journals.

An Album of Indian Big Tops

An Album of Indian Big Tops
Author: Sreedharan Champad
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2013-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1622127668

An Album of Indian Big Tops, chronicling the circus industry in India from 1880 to 2010, was written by Sreedharan Champad, a flying trapeze artist, journalist, story writer, novelist, film script writer, and circus historian. His book reveals the history of Indian circus life and art, as well as details about the industry. He directly contacted the most prominent people in the Indian circus from the 1950s onward and has researched all available records, making this a lifetime achievement. It took him more than fifty years to complete this history about a "dying art," and no one before has attempted such a book. The book was inspired because, "I had spent my school vacations in circus tents in my boyhood, because some of my close relatives were circus artists living in circus tents."

Jumbos and Jumping Devils

Jumbos and Jumping Devils
Author: Nisha P.R.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-06-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190992077

Jumbos and Jumping Devils is a pioneering exploration of the social history of circus in India over the last 150 years. It presents a wide variety of amazing tales ranging from the blooming and evolution of circus acrobatics in early twentieth-century Malabar to the sensational legal battles following the ban of wild animals and children from the circus ring in the twenty-first century. Alongside extensive fieldwork and interviews, the author has used memorabilia including photographs, notices, posters, letters, diaries, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, and recollections of the circus community to chronicle the hitherto untold story of the Indian circus. The book paves the way for a new sociocultural analysis of performance genres and popular culture in the subcontinent against several overlapping contexts. These include the remaking of caste and gender identities, transformation of physical cultures and bodies, interventions of the colonial and postcolonial states, and emergence of new transregional and transnational spaces.

Performing the Cold War in the Postcolonial World

Performing the Cold War in the Postcolonial World
Author: Christopher B. Balme
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2023-07-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 100093263X

This volume explores how the Cultural Cold War played out in Africa and Asia in the context of decolonization. Both the United States and the Soviet Union as well as East European states undertook significant efforts to influence cultural life in the newly independent, postcolonial world. The different forms of influence are the subject of this book. The contributions are grouped around four topic headings. "Networks and Institutions" looks at the various ways Western-style theatre became institutionalized in the decolonial world, especially Africa. "Cultural Diplomacy" focuses on the activities of the Soviet Union in India in the late 1950s and 1960s in the very different arenas of book publishing and the circus. "Artists and Agency" explores how West African filmmakers (Ousmane Sembène and Abderrahmane Sissako) and European authors (Brecht and Ibsen) were harnessed for different kinds of Cold War strategies. Finally, "Cultures of Things" investigates how everyday objects such as books and iconic theatre buildings became suffused with affect, nostalgia, and ideology. This book will be of interest for students of the Cold War, postcolonial studies, theatre, film, and literature. Chapters 1, 4, 8, and 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Funded by the European Research Council Project "Developing Theatre".

Entertaining Children

Entertaining Children
Author: G. Arrighi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2014-05-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137305460

Children have been exploited as performers and wooed energetically as consumers throughout history. These essays offer scholarly investigations into the employment and participation of children in the entertainment industry with examples drawn from historical and contemporary contexts.

Circus as Multimodal Discourse

Circus as Multimodal Discourse
Author: Paul Bouissac
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2012-10-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1441135758

Now available in paperback, this volume presents a theory of the circus as a secular ritual and introduces a method to analyze its performances as multimodal discourse. The book's fifteen chapters cover the range of circus specialties (magic, domestic and wild animal training, acrobatics, and clowning) and provide examples to show how cultural meaning is produced, extended and amplified by circus performances. Bouissac is one of the world's leading authorities on circus ethnography and semiotics and this work is grounded on research conducted over a 50 year span in Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas. It concludes with a reflection on the potentially subversive power of this discourse and its contemporary use by activists. Throughout, it endeavours to develop an analytical approach that is mindful of the epistemological traps of both positivism and postmodernist license. It brings semiotics and ethnography to bear on the realm of the circus.

The Cambridge Companion to the Circus

The Cambridge Companion to the Circus
Author: Gillian Arrighi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2021-07-01
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1108617689

The Cambridge Companion to the Circus provides a complete guide for students, scholars, teachers, researchers, and practitioners who are seeking perspectives on the foundations and evolution of the modern circus, the contemporary extent of circus studies, and the specialised literature available to support further enquiries. The volume brings together an international group of established and emerging scholars working across the multi-disciplinary domain of circus studies to present a clear overview of the specialised histories, aesthetics and distinctive performances of the modern circus. In sixteen commissioned essays, it covers the origins in commercial equestrian performance during the late-eighteenth century to contemporary inflections of circus arts in major international festivals, educational environments, and social justice settings.

News Reporting And Editing

News Reporting And Editing
Author: K.M. Shrivastava (rev. Edn.)
Publisher: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
Total Pages: 338
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 9788120725911

Gendered Citizenship

Gendered Citizenship
Author: Bishnupriya Dutt
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2017-11-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3319590936

This book explores how citizenship is differently gendered and performed across national and regional boundaries. Using ‘citizenship’ as its organizing concept, it is a collection of multidisciplinary approaches to legal, socio-cultural and performative aspects of gender construction and identity: violence against women, victimhood and agency, and everyday issues of socialization in a globalized world. It brings together scholars of politics, media, and performance who are committed to dialogue across both nation and discipline. This study is the culmination of a two-year project on the topic of 'Gendered Citizenship', arising from an international collaboration that has sought to develop a comparative and yet singular perspective on performance in relation to key political themes facing our countries of origin in the early decades of this century. The research is interdisciplinary and multinational, drawing on Indian, European, and North and South American contexts.